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Friday, October 24, 2014

The Yuck Factor

A couple of weeks ago, on what I now refer to as Bloody
Monday, I had a molar extracted.The
tooth extraction was quick and painless. But what followed weakened my squeamish
knees.

The nurse told me to keep a firm pressure on the gauze
covering the extraction site, periodically changing it during the next few hours until all bleeding
stopped.

“Don’t go by the gauze,” she said. “It will be bloody every
time you remove it. Look in your mouth to see if blood is still
dripping, or get someone to look.”

That ain’t gonna happen, I thought. I’ll never be able to
find somebody who 1) is willing to look in my mouth, and 2) won’t faint at the
sight.

Then I remembered. People love zombies. There’s an absolute
zombie craze happening in movies and television programs. With the new season
of The Walking Dead, zombie costumes
will be this year’s hottest Halloween selection, forecasts Gary Lipovetsky, co-CEO
of social commerce website bestie.com.

What is it that draws so many people to The Yuck Factor, I
wonder. To delight in fright, to find entertainment at the sight of zombies
feeding on human brains, to relish the repulsive?

We humans have at least a 2,000-year history of putting
ourselves in touch with the horrible. The origin of Halloween is found in ancient Celtic festivals.
Samhain commenced on the eve of October 31 and kicked off the Celtic New Year
the following day. The Celts saw this as a period when the veil
between the worlds of the living and the dead was the most transparent, enabling the spirits of the dead to visit earth.

Dr. Margee Kerr, an expert on fear, says humans are obsessed
with death because we have a hard time wrapping our mind around what happens
after we die. We want a life that goes on after we die. Or better yet, we yearn to live
forever. But this violates the laws of nature and is, therefore, terrifying.

Why do we like being scared so much?

People are curious about how much fear they can tolerate.
There is a sense of satisfaction when we prove to ourselves that we can
handle more anxiety than we had imagined. Scary situations leave us with a
sense of confidence after it’s over.

There’s also a hormonal reaction when we are exposed to a
threat or crisis, and this can stimulate our love of being scared. The moment
we feel threatened, we feel increasingly more strong and powerful physically
and more intuitive emotionally. We know this charge to our physical and mental
state as an “adrenaline rush.” As humans, we are hard-wired to crave this type
of feeling.

On a psychological level we’re attracted to vicariously
experience the forbidden, the bizarre and the dark. Horror films in particular
let us explore fear in an enjoyable and safe way. They also allow us to engage
with evil without getting ourselves into trouble. Identifying with the dark
side of the human condition is probably as cathartic as a Greek tragedy.The Yuck Factor is also
a philosophical line of thinking – applied especially to bioethics – suggesting
that an intuitive negative response to something is evidence that it’s
intrinsically harmful or evil.

So as we count down to the Halloween horrors that lie only
days away – the oozing undead, the blood-thirsty vampires, the visiting phantom
spirits, the worms and maggots and spiders -- let’s keep this old Scottish
prayer on our lips: